“... assimilate him to the picturesque. ‘The dead are cadmium blue,’ he declares in ‘Homage to Paul Cézanne’: ‘We spread them with palette knives in broad blocks and panes.’ To gaze into ‘panes’ as opaque as these is mortally to reflect. That a spiritual challenge should be found in the medium is entirely characteristic. Like Hopkins, Wright ...”

“... could.’ This was the sketchy outline I carried with me to New York on a trip, with the producer Paul Quinn, to research a radio programme about the Beat heritage. I’d never been there before, never met Corso. I’d seen him, in the tweed sports jacket of a young academic, performing, sober, at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 ...”

“... that was explicit by the time Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reached the screen with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. The play and movie were both big successes; Williams lived on them for decades. But the struggle over the third act had been painful, and his friendship with Kazan was never quite the same. He said once that the rewriting ‘seemed almost like a ...”

“... informed that skeletal remains had been found by a man out walking with his children on Shelling Hill beach, which is essentially a continuation of Templetown beach. Some members of the family say their mother was identified by a blue nappy pin attached to her cardigan. Helen says this is nonsense. Jean McConville had been shot once in the back of the ...”

“... or the headwaters of the Amazon, many now work closer to home, on the border between Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, or in a venture capital company that does gene-sequencing. Nevertheless, the core themes of myth, death and reproduction draw even these new anthropologists back into the traditional fold. Medical anthropologists do birth, sickness, decay ...”

“... Marxism​ is still very young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three decades earlier when he, too, was still very young. At the time, the author of Capital had seemed a figure of merely historical interest. ‘Here are the conceptions of a German intellectual who lived in London in the middle of the last century,’ Sartre remembered thinking ...”

“... the original site. The Beatles Story Museum opened in 1990 and the National Trust later purchased Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s childhood homes.Liverpool’s history as a port has also been central to its economic revival, but this legacy is more contested. In 1984, the Maritime Museum opened in an old warehouse on the Albert Dock, with a mission to ...”

“... he was rejected. ‘I want to wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.’ The lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s standard ring out like a mocking chorus from the Yankee Stadium when the hometown wins. Poor Trump, who thought the song should be his anthem, could never shake his ‘little town blues’. His humiliation ...”

“... known at all, as one of a group of youngish Conservatives who had been christened ‘the Notting Hill set’ by Derek Conway, an MP from a rival faction. In this context, Notting Hill, where Cameron and many of his friends live, connotes wealth, organic food, possible drugginess and a degree of social ...”

“... of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing … to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness … These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators … You can get an awful lot done just at the staff ...”

“... in the corridors of power: some of the Moonie ‘sisters’ even gained permanent jobs on Capitol Hill, notably Susan Bergman, who became an assistant to the House Speaker, Carl Albert. Before long various Moonie front organisations had won the willing patronage of numerous conservative Congressmen and Senators – including Robert Michel, the Republican ...”

“... it was another fifteen years before they were consolidated into one memorial on Cathcart’s Hill. This was itself never adequately safeguarded: it was ravaged during the Second World War and later by Khrushchev’s bulldozers. The military campaign itself was remembered mainly for a single piece of ghastly incompetence – the charge of the light ...”

“... by studying the size of his briefcase as he arrived for monetary policy meetings. Before him came Paul Volcker, who, when Mervyn King asked him for a word of central banking advice, replied: ‘Mystique.’ Devotees thought of Greenspan as the chief architect of the ‘great moderation’, the long boom of the 1990s and the post-9/11 recovery, which were ...”

“... back through his pieces for the paper, and the reviews of his books, among them a glowing piece by Paul Foot in 1986, is to know that he isn’t easily pinned down. Yet if there were laws against inciting party political hatred, Johnson would have been fined and marginalised as a red-baiter on many occasions in many countries: he is a reliable, aggressive ...”

“... Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids this week.’ ‘To ...”